This invention relates to an image processing method, and more particularly, to an image processing method capable of searching for an image in a document.
The capacity of a storage has been increasing recently, and consequently a large amount of document data, which is difficult to search by means of an ordinary method, can now be accumulated in the storage. As a result, for example, the number of applications for a large amount of document data is increased by storing the document data in a storage which can be shared by respective computers, thereby enabling an organization such as a company to share information, and to use the existing document data as materials for creating a new document.
As a method for searching the document data in those applications, a method of directly referring to a folder in which files are stored, thereby referring to target document data, and a method of searching for text information containing a certain word by means of a query, thereby searching for document data containing the text information have mainly been used conventionally.
However, the search based only on the text information can narrow down the document data to a certain extent, but there has been a problem that a search result cannot be narrowed down to documents close in contents. Moreover, when a proper word is not used for the query, there has been a problem that a miss in the search occurs.
On the other hand, as cameras on cellular phones and digital cameras prevail, and an image creation function of word processing software is increasingly used, documents containing a large number of images in addition to texts, which has conventionally been a main subject of search, are increasing.
A method of individually calculating similarities using not only texts but also a document structure representing a plurality of pieces of image information in a document, and how images are structured, and searching the document using a comprehensive evaluation value obtained by the calculated similarities as a similarity in the document data, a method of displaying these documents (see, for example, Japanese Patent Application Laid-open Nos. 2000-148793 and 2006-146628), and the like are proposed.